Graeter’s is a regional ice cream chain based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Founded in 1870 by Louis C. Graeter, the company has since expanded to 50 retail locations selling ice cream, candy and baked goods in the Midwestern United States. It further distributes its ice cream to 6,000 stores throughout the country. As of 2017, the company had 1,050 employees and $60 million in revenue.
Initially, the shop offered only vanilla and chocolate flavors in a dish or a cone. It began offering seasonal strawberry, lemon and peach flavors when the fruits were in season, expanding them to year-round flavors thanks to cold storage capabilities. Graeter’s considers eight flavors, including black cherry, coffee, strawberry, butter pecan, and several sorbet flavors, as its original menu.
Graeter’s sources its dairy products from nearby Louis Trauth Dairy and Smith Dairy, and later made both of them distributors of its ice cream. It has retained its recipe of cream, sugar, eggs and flavorings, and has avoided changing the recipe during health trends or amid competition from healthier frozen treat brands, or those using artificial sweeteners. Though it is gravitated to more all-natural ingredients in recent years, including substituting beet juice instead of food dye and sourcing dairy products from hormone-free cows. There are some exceptions, such as vanilla that is imported from Madagascar. In the Cincinnati market it has continued to out-sell Ben & Jerry’s and Häagen-Dazs ice cream at Kroger locations in the Cincinnati market, making the city the only place in the country where those brands are not top sellers in the supermarket.
Instead of adding chocolate chips to the ice cream, Graeter’s devised a technique to add melted chocolate mixed with a small amount of vegetable oil near the end of the stirring process, which results in chocolate chunks of different sizes. According to the company’s recollections, this technique was created when a young Wilmer Graeter stole chocolate and poured it into a pot of ice cream. For a time, it also molded ice cream into different shapes to serve. These chocolate chips were incorporated into a number of flavors to great success, and by 2010 chocolate chip ice cream flavors accounted for 70 percent of its sales. A bittersweet Hershey-based fudge sauce was created before World War II for use in sundaes, and the company later shifted to using a chocolate from a Nestlé spinoff company. It added parfaits, milkshakes and sodas as well over time. Later, it also introduced gelato, sorbet, and low-glycemic desserts. Dick Graeter first created a Black Raspberry flavor, and around the 1970s began adding chocolate chips. For a time it sold both varieties but discontinued the first version after the second was more successful. This flavor has since become the best-selling flavor in the chain, accounting for 20 percent of its overall sales by 2010. He also launched a program for seasonal flavors of ice cream, notably beginning with a coconut variety in January, cherry chocolate chip in February, chocolate almond in March and so on. After a time, it instead offered “seasonal” flavors for up to three months at a time, with favorites including strawberry chocolate chip in the springtime, or peppermint or eggnog around the end of the wintertime.
